You’ve been asleep for ten hours but you wake up and it’s actually only been ninety minutes and what woke you up was the sound of the woman in the next hospital bed whimpering with pain.
Her whimpers turn to sobs that turn to groans as her head threatens to explode from pain. Where the hell does it come from? The doctors can’t say, it looked like an aneurism but all the tests in the world, the MRI tube of pain, the dye of pain, the lumbar puncture of pain, can’t confirm or deny their vague diagnosis.

So she’s crying out for the nurse, who gives her Panadeine Forte, but that takes a good twenty minutes to work, and in the meantime her arms and legs start tingling and pretty soon she can’t feel her hands, and who is there to comfort her? The nurse has gone away to page a doctor, and the woman is calling out, ‘Come back. Don’t leave me. I’m scared. Somebody?’

You’re lying two feet away from her in your roofless tent, earplugs out, wide awake, wondering if you should ease yourself painfully out of bed and go to the side of this woman and hold her hand (what if she doesn’t want you to?) and tell her someone cares (what if she doesn’t believe you?).
You don’t move.

You lie there silently and half of you is resenting your broken sleep and wishing she’d shut up and the other half knows exactly how she feels, how unspeakably awful this pain is, how you think you’re going to die and you half wish you would. But you don’t move. You just lie there behind your sky-blue hospital curtain, blushing with shame.

Eventually the pills kick in and she sleeps. But you don’t, not for a long time.

In the morning you offer your sympathy, too little too late, and she apologises for waking you in the night. Somehow the night’s dramas have opened everybody up and pretty soon the other two women in the ward are telling their stories too.

There’s Polly who has five kids from three different fathers, but her new boyfriend is different, she says. She’d been having a holiday, the first day of a week-long holiday from her job cleaning in a nursing home where she really loves the old folk. She says they have a great sense of humour. One old woman, Gladys, said about a new resident, ‘who’s that bastard?’ and when Polly said ‘I beg your pardon’, Gladys said ‘whose is that basket?’ and smiled a sly smile.

So Polly’s on holiday and she’s kissing her new boyfriend and suddenly it feels like a small plane has done a suicide plummet into her temples and she can’t stand up for the pain. Her boyfriend calls the hospital and she has to be airlifted from her country town to Melbourne because they don’t have the technology to sort her out up there. The trouble is, they don’t seem to have it here either. She’s been through all the technologies of pain too, and they can’t figure her out. She’s also had a drip inserted into the wrong part of her body all night so instead of reaching her veins it’s gone into her soft muscle tissue and her arms have swollen up. When the offending doctor comes around in the morning to sort it out, she apologises to him for causing trouble.

And then there’s Beryl whose son-in-law has promised to buy her a Frankenstein mask because that’s what the new scar on her temple reminds him of, and she thinks it’s a hoot. She’s quite disinhibited and often talks to herself, and you’ve learnt not to feel like you have to respond. Beryl got sacked from her job last week, by letter, because her boss couldn’t wait the three months it will take her to recover (if she’s lucky). So she’s asking the nurse if there are any jobs for her at the hospital, and offering to go to a job interview in her nightie.

She asks you if you’re married, or have any children, and when the answer is no, she and the others lose interest in you. You’re half disappointed and half glad, because even though you could tell them some stories, none of yours could compete with theirs.

Even when you close your eyes you can’t block out their pain and their after-midnight groans and their sad, worried children and their uncertain futures. You ache with the relief of knowing that soon you’ll be out of here, now that they’ve chopped the protruding bit off your dodgy spine, but next week these women will still be here, propped up on their pillows, hair awry, mouths dry, waiting for the next round of pills and the next visit from the be-suited young doctors who hold all the answers – except maybe they don’t.

You wonder for a long time afterwards why you hadn’t gone to the crying woman.

And what if you had?

(‘Shy – a memoir’ will be published by Text Publishing on May 28th 2014.)